Autonomous Region of Bougainville

The Autonomous Region of Bougainville is an autonomous region of Papua New Guinea that includes Bougainville, Buka, and the Carteret Islands. Although Bougainville is geographically a part of the Solomon Islands, the island is a possession of Papua New Guinea; separatists fought a war against the government in the 1990s in the Bougainville Civil War, and in 2005 the Autonomous Region of Bougainville was formed to appease the separatists with more autonomy. The region had a population of 249,358 in 2011.